From Kate McKinnon’s first sketch on Saturday Night Live in 2012, it was evident she’d be a star. Appearing in a Pantene commercial as Penélope Cruz, alongside then-host Sofía Vergara, McKinnon delivered Cruz’s Castilian Spanish accent with a winking twist.

The poet Mary Oliver was a legendary observer of nature. She chronicled scuttling hermit crabs and mossy hollows, “freshets of wind” and the “wild, clawed light” of the sun.Her reverence for the natural world was clear—not just because she described it so frequently, but because of her exquisite detail. Oliver wrote with the kind of precision that came from the heightened attention of deep love.

Margaret Atwood came to fiction by way of poetry, as did Michael Ondaatje and Wole Soyinka. In their novels, as in those of the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, who wrote songs and poems before turning to fiction, the attention to sensory experience is particularly keen, concise, and meaningful. Kawakami doesn’t just assemble a tactile detail and park it in a scene. Sensation itself drives her scenes, the way the senses can steer a poem.

In the weeks after the 2020 election, one particular Michigan woman was trumpeting claims of fraud as loudly as she could. Kristina Karamo, a community-college professor who’d previously accused Democrats of having a “satanic agenda,” went on Fox News again and again to describe how illegal ballots supposedly had been tallied for Joe Biden at the TCF Center in Detroit, where she worked as a poll watcher.

Starting in the spring of 2020, school boards and superintendents across the country faced a dreadful choice: Keep classrooms open and risk more COVID-19 deaths, or close schools and sacrifice children’s learning. In the name of safety, many districts shut down for long periods. But researchers are now learning that the closures came at a stiff price—a large decline in children’s achievement overall and a historic widening in achievement gaps by race and economic status.